Veteran Boston Reporter: Beantown Well Prepared for Marathon

Veteran Boston reporter Howie Carr says law enforcement officials in Beantown are doing a good job of preparing for the Boston Marathon in the wake of last year's deadly bombings.

"The police, you know, they're not going to have anybody moving around in bulletproof vests or Kevlar," he told Newsmax TV's John Bachman and J.D. Hayworth on "America's Forum" on Wednesday.

"There's not going to be anyone with automatic weapons. You're not going to have to go through security gates. When you have 26.2 miles of course, which extends over eight different cities and towns, you can't block off everything," he said.

"They also said, 'Well, we would ask you not to bring your backpacks with you,' because you know what would happen if people saw that there was a line of people to get searched for backpacks, then just started abandoning them.

"I can tell you, after what happened last year, after the explosions, people were turning in just an empty bag from Target or a supermarket – there's a bag down here and everyone was scrambling around and it was just pure craziness," he said.

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Carr is a columnist for the Boston Herald and has hosted a weekday radio talk show on Boston's WRKO since 1994. He also has worked as a reporter and commentator for Boston television stations WGBH and WLVI.

Despite security concerns surrounding the coming trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, an accused bomber, Carr said the people of Boston would not want the proceedings to be held somewhere else.

"They want it right here so they can see it. The most disturbing thing about it is the fact that after his teen throb, Tiger Beat picture appeared on Rolling Stone, they had these teeny bopper types showing up at the trial with 'Free Dzhokhar,' 'I wanna marry you, Dzhokhar.' It was very disturbing."

Asked about another case that made news in Boston last week, when a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that a man who took cellphone photos up the skirts of women riding the subway did not violate state law because the women were not "nude or partially nude," Carr replied:

"It was somewhat disconcerting, the vote was nine to nothing. There are some Republicans on that court, you'd think someone would have said, 'hey this is not, maybe this is a poorly worded statue, but this is not what the legislature meant.'"